Endorsement Endorphin

Is there a living American whose endorsement would have meant more to the candidacy of Barack Obama than Colin Powell’s? I’m not asking rhetorically. I’d really like to know. Nancy Reagan? Bush the Elder? Henry Kissinger?

How about a revered sports figure? There aren’t too many of those any more in this growth-hormone era. Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh? Michael Jordan? Bobby Orr? Tiger Woods? (Or would he just be Powell without the substance?) O.K., some icon of popular culture? Bruce Springsteen, Tony Bennet, Stevie Wonder, Oprah Winfrey? (No, Obama’s got them already.) Clint Eastwood? Dolly Parton? Or a twofer like Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Rush Limbaugh, I’m thinking. That would be a real Fat Man Bites Rabid Dog story. But no. The big guy’s negatives are way too high. (And even if you expand the field to include the six billion people who aren’t Americans, you’re hard put. The Dalai Lama? Pope Benedict XVI? Anyone?)

It wasn’t just the “who” of Powell’s endorsement, i.e., a résumé that includes service as Reagan’s National Security Adviser, Bush the Elder’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Bush the Younger’s Secretary of State and a history of loyal Republicanism from the Nixon years until, literally, yesterday. (Powell, the most famous black Republican since Frederick Douglass, maxed out as a McCain contributor during the current electoral cycle and was mentioned as a possible running mate.) It was the force and focus of what he said.

Powell’s presentation on “Meet the Press” had the casualness of an interview but the structure and pointedness of an argument crafted into a speech. He began by laying out the issues he regards as important: the global economy; Iraq and Afghanistan; the need for better relations with allies and for being “willing to talk to people who we have not been willing to talk to before”; the need for leadership on energy, global warming, and the environment; the plight of the poorest countries, which he linked to the problem of terrorism. Only then did he turn to his choice for President, making it explicit only after expressing his affection for McCain.

He said that the financial crisis had constituted a kind of “final exam” for the two candidates, one that Obama had passed and McCain had failed. He cited McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as having “raised some question in my mind as to the judgment that Senator McCain made.” He praised the contrasting “steadiness” and “intellectual vigor” of Obama, adding:

On the Republican side over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party and Mr. McCain has become narrower and narrower. Mr. Obama, at the same time, has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people. He’s crossing lines—ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines. He’s thinking about all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values.

General Powell—who is from a small town called the Bronx—then offered a devastating, definitive critique of what he called “this Bill Ayers situation”:

Why do we have these robocalls going on around the country trying to suggest that, because of this very, very limited relationship that Senator Obama has had with Mr. Ayers, somehow, Mr. Obama is tainted? What they’re trying to do is connect him to is some kind of terrorist feelings. And I think that’s inappropriate.

The emotional climax of Powell’s argument came next. It turned on the death of a twenty-year-old Muslim American soldier, and it happens to have been prompted by the magazine I work for, so I can’t help feeling some institutional pride.

And his conclusion:

So, when I look at all of this and I think back to my Army career, we’ve got two individuals. Either one of them could be a good President. But which is the President that we need now? Which is the individual that serves the needs of the nation for the next period of time? And I come to the conclusion that because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and his rhetorical abilities—and we have to take that into account—as well as his substance—he has both style and substance—he has met the standard of being a successful President, being an exceptional President. I think he is a transformational figure. He is a new generation coming into the world, onto the world stage, onto the American stage. And for that reason I’ll be voting for Senator Barack Obama.

All of it said calmly and gravely, without a single hesitation, and without notes—a stunning performance. Notwithstanding the conventional platitudes about how endorsements don’t really matter, this one does. The McCain campaign’s tactics (it doesn’t have a strategy, and it doesn’t seem to know the difference) have been left in tatters. So much for Obama’s “associations.”

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.